Those of you yearning for the experience of running a 1990s-vintage graphics workstation are about to have a good day: a developer named Eric Masson has resurrected the IRIX Interactive Desktop that shipped on Silicon Graphics Workstations and now offers it as a Linux desktop alternative.
Silicon Graphics (SGI) had a crack at …

Perhaps I'm a dinosaur - but I prefer these old GUIs to the overly flashy GUIs of today. I like OpenStep, TWM and the IRIX GUI. they're simple, uncluttered, and functional. I'm delighted by this development - and I'll certainly give it a bash on my Linux box (GNUStep, despite interesting but abandoned (and, in any case, too flashy) developments like Etoile, doesn't work brilliantly well).

Fingers crossed that this one is Ronseal (does what it says on the tin)

When I first used Linux, I set it up with olvwm, and just used the commandline in the little console window to launch GUI applications. Mostly plain ol' xterms (and variants on that theme) for working in, but also a web browser and other such modern gizmos.

I'd still work like that if I hadn't got fed up with the number of hoops they make us jump through today.

XFCE on Mint

The reason I stick with XFCE on Mint, maybe not as simple a desktop as something like CDE but XFCE is simple, stays out of the way as it should, stuff can be found in a split second and it just runs stuff without any silly graphics frills. In a busy IT environment where Windows is king I want to run a Linux desktop, I need something fast and so simple my granny could use it. Topped with Firefox, Evolution, SQLDeveloper, Terminator ( superb fast, multi-split terminal windows ) for getting to the *nix servers and a copy of rDesktop for Windows access when necessary, all sorted.

Yes!Since about 2005 there has been a continual erosion in the end-user configurability of desktops, and a mad proliferation of "look at me interfaces. Of course, they have to rip off the knobs, to force everyone to look at their so called "pretty" and "modern cruft. I maintain there's nothing wrong with a system that just does its job and otherwise stays out of the way

Re: XFCE on Mint

+1 for Mint XFCE. Fast, unobtrusive, low RAM overhead for a GUI, and it runs great on anything from a Core 2 Duo on up. There are lighter distros, of course, but IMHO Mint XFCE hits the sweet spot for footprint, performance, and functionality.

SGI's early Linux servers were shipped with the option of either Redhat Enterprise Server or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, running either the standard KDE or Gnome GUIs according to user preference. SGI never ported the IRIX GUI to Linux, though it did port the XFS file system and a number of other tools to Linux. The effort described in this article began as a third party project to port the look and feel of the IRIX desktop to Linux, under a limited license from SGI.

Hardware nostalgia

I remember my second '90s SGI workstation[1] particularly fondly. But that was down to the superb quality of the hardware: a monitor that was a pleasure to use (now long-surpassed by others, particularly Mac), and a fantastic keyboard that still stands out as the best I've encountered in my life.

There was no pleasure to the software. Well, it was a functioning UNIX system on which one could build all the usual apps, but no more than that, and it was certainly buggier than Sun kit of the same era. I don't even recollect the desktop environment, except in that it was the first to be configured with a GUI login screen rather than a CLI login followed by some invocation like "xinit" or "startx".

Re: Hardware nostalgia

It is now 2017 and I am typing this on an Silicon Graphics keyboard! Well, yes, running Slackware, not Irix.

I have once and only once seen a Silicon Graphics hardware failure. One day I returned to my office after lunch and noticed a strange smell. One of the two board of the IRIS workstation that I used at the time had to be replaced because of an electrical shortcut.

Another incident was when a SGI server that was used for MPEG encoding regularly failed because a RAM-module was ripped out of the machine while it was running, apparently without further damage. We got the cleaners who did this on camera.

Re: Hardware nostalgia

I do still have a bunch of SGI kit that I acquired when it was being thrown out. Kept meaning to do something with them and never quite found the time.

As a result, hidden at the back of our server room is a Challenge L (4xR8000) (it is actually exceedingly difficult to 'hide' a Challenge server the size of a small fridge), 2-3 Indigo2s in various states of disrepair (including 1 Indigo2 Impact), a couple of Indys and an O2. The Challenge needed some hard disks, I think the Indigo2s were fine but had stripped them down in order to max the RAM in one.

When it comes to "desktops" that don't either require the user to do really extensive config or make it difficult at best to customize simple things (like choosing the color and style for window elements, not a united preset theme**), there really isn't anymore.

**I wouldn't mind the united preset approach if 99% of the options didn't boil down to "grayscale with a very minor accent color." (If I want my windows to be a shade of blue, dammit, I don't want to have my options boil down to "gray with slight hint of teal", "black with a hint of cerulean", and "white with faint blush of something that might qualify as blue in the right light.")

SGI - Playing at work

I was at a Flight Sim company that used SGI for modelling the scenarios and it had the software to fly around the model to check for artifacts, break-up etc and many a quiet hour was spent practising landing the curved approach at the old Hong Kong airport.

There was even a company using SGI systems slapped on a basic cockpit as an starter pack for trainee pilots, the graphics really were that good.

The IRIX desktop is basically a port of CDE with a few extra apps thrown in. The source of CDE was open sourced a few years ago and there is an active project cleaning up and porting the code to modern Unix like operating systems.

While both CDE and the IRIX desktop were built using the Motif toolkit, they are two very different beasts with very different desktop metaphors, configurations, code, and essentially no overlap at the desktop application level. Both were first released within a few months of each other in 1993. (Note: it was possible to install CDE instead of the IRIX desktop on SGI machines, but that was a relatively rare scenario. Perhaps that is what you are remembering?)

Of the triumvirate who escaped Stanford (Cisco, Sun, and SGI), SGI initially concentrated on building graphics terminals to connect to big machines but soon started running IRIX locally to appeal to the graphics intensive workstation market (including pharmaceutical drug design). These were initially 68000 machines but soon adopted the MIPS processor.

The introduction of "low end" (< £10,000) workstations for multimedia in the 1990s was an attempt to attack the Mac domination of the content creation market. Not entirely successfully, although I did run Photoshop 3 on an SGI for a while.

I still have an Indy Webforce in store, but not sure if it would still boot, nor if the psu caps are still ok. The monitor was given away years ago, but a TFT would work fine. Had Photoshop, Illustrator, a good flight sim, web and video apps etc, out of the box + of course, the Indy Webcam. Years ahead of it's time and beautiful artsy desktop, but too expensive for most. They really were the king of colour graphics at the time...

I get the impression that the Computational Chemists have never quite forgiven us for getting rid of the SGI boxes in favour of HP workstations running Linux. We do still have a couple of productiveish SGI workstations running some software that "was ruined" when it was ported to Linux!

Onyx

Ah, the 90's. In the post production place I worked, we had several Onyx machines, which were something to behold. They were 5.5 feet tall, and you could fly a kite above their fan output vents. Awesome kit.

If the effort spent in writing the n-th ddesktop manager for Linux...

... was spent in making one truly usable with a decent design, decent icons and decent fonts... there would also a lot of spare time to write decent, usable desktop applications. And maybe we would see more commercial and useful software ported on Linux as well, with less variables to cope with (of course, for those who are not so miserly and greed they can't pay for software).

A good example when more choices actually just means fewer, real, usable ones. But this will be the year of Linux on the desktop... just it's the same desktop, just changing manager <G>.

Re: If the effort spent in writing the n-th ddesktop manager for Linux...

That's kind of the point of this project, though. The old IRIX Interactive Desktop *was* "truly usable with a decent design, decent icons and decent fonts." While it might not have all of the fancy animations, transparencies, and so on that people expect today, it was a mature, snappy, well-designed GUI that nicely balanced essential functionality with unobtrusiveness. I kept using it long after SGI systems were surpassed in raw performance because no other Unix/Linux X11 GUI matched that balance. I look forward to trying this on modern hardware.

"and maybe do serious work"

You mean maybe spend the best part of two weekends fiddling about, getting everything to compile, getting your existing apps to work with it, hours spent searching obscure foreign-language forums (mangled through Google Translate) for an answer to why X won't work with Y, all for a 2% subjective improvement in the GUI? No thanks.

Too long ago to remeber exactly what it was

but I used to use an SGI workstation and Cadence software to do chip design. I do remember it would process at 1Mips which seemed incredible considering it was 100th the volume of the similar performance VAX box in the server room.

I remember it being a really nice machine to work on - and the combination with the Cadence software let me do some amazing things. Got a bit scared after a long long session when a colleague down the corridor worked out how to fuck with my XWindows making it melt slowly after disabling the keyboard. If I'd lost that work I would have fried the bastard.